Witness seminar – Transcript
December 13th 2024
Part 1: Welcome, introductions, and student transition

Claire Orwin (DMU)
If we can just start by a quick round of introductions, please. Who you are, your institution and your role in the project? I'm Dr Claire Orwin. I'm Associate Dean Academic at the University for the Faculty of Arts, Design and Humanities and I'm Project Lead.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
I'm Jason Eyre, I'm a Senior Lecturer in Learning Development in DMU's Centre for Learning and Study Support and my interest here is in peer learning.

Tracy Slawson (DMU)
I'm Tracy Slawson and I'm a Senior Lecturer in Learning Development, and I work alongside Jason in Centre for Learning and Study Support at DMU. I contribute to and design some aspects of the work that we do around transition. My involvement in the project is because of that.

Susan Orr (DMU)
I'm Susan Orr, Pro Vice Chancellor Education and Equalities here at DMU.

Colin Milligan (GCU)
Colin Milligan, Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow Caledonian University where I am an institutional researcher. I get drafted into other people's work rather than running a service on my own.

Wayne Clark (UAL)
Morning everyone, I'm Wayne Clark from University of the Arts, London. I'm a Student Learning and Engagement Coordinator. I work with Tanyeem and Leanne and we're mainly focusing on the enquiry-based learning aspect of this project.

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
Hi, I'm Tanyeem. I'm a Student Learning and Engagement Coordinator with Wayne and Leanne at the University of the Arts London. As Wayne said, a lot of the work that we're doing is around supporting student engagement, retention, attainment and student experience. 

Leanne Grice (UAL)
Hi, I'm Leanne and I'm a Student Learning and Engagement Coordinator at UAL. Our main role is working with students, but part of our role is also working with staff as well and talking to them about how they can improve engagement on their course through different staff development and initiatives.

Catherine McConnell (UoB)
Hi, I'm Catherine McConnell. I am Head of Student Academic Success at the University of Brighton and my role there involves a lot around planning and activities for the access and participation plan. My interest in this project and contribution is around the peer communities, in particular online. This project, but peer communities broadly in most aspects of my work.

Alex Cazaly (UoB)
I'm Alex Cazaly from the University of Brighton. I'm a Project Coordinator for Student Academic Success in the same team as Catherine. My role focuses a lot on developing peer learning and peer mentoring schemes at the university. My focus is largely on also the peer community’s aspect.

Vanessa Clarke (DMU)
I'm Vanessa Clarke, I'm PA to Claire Orwin, assisting with the whole sticky course project.

Alasdair Blair (DMU)
I'm Alasdair I am Associate Pro Vice Chancellor of Education, working with Susan and particularly working with Claire on retention and also very interested in working on the project, interested in this idea even of the witness seminar.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Hi everyone. I'm Dr Nicola Bishop and I work for the DMU Education Academy and I'm still quite new. I'm only in my second month, so I'm a late arrival to the project but very excited about everything I've read about it.

Claire Orwin (DMU)
Thank you everyone. I'll introduce the proceedings and what we've got coming up. A witness seminar, for those of you who perhaps haven't attended one before meeting, draws on the knowledge and experience of the panel of the people in the room to reflect and discuss around a particular subject to form a resource. It's often been used in a historical context and broader academic debates on a range of subjects. What we're doing today is using it as a framework to talk about student retention in the university, particularly in line with the project and the concept of sticky courses and doing it through that lens. What we've got today is we've divided it up into four sections. The first 3 sections each focus on a strand of the project and then the final element of the witness seminar is going to draw that together to look at sticky courses. We'll propose questions to people who've been nominated as panellists around those particular themes. Then at the end of each section, what we'll do is give an opportunity for other people to feed in, maybe add reflections, etcetera. Nicola has very kindly come along to chair and facilitate that today. The room is facilitated with a microphone, so that should pick everything up. We are recording and transcribing the meeting and, just to let you know, after the meeting we'll share the recording. We'll share the transcription and you'll be able to make any adjustments. Maybe grammatical errors, or maybe something that you'd like to strike from the record. The idea is that that will become a resource in itself for the project and will go on the website, the transcription, but also it will help to inform our sticky course toolkit and course guidelines. Without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Professor Susan Orr, our PVC Education and Equalities at DMU to just give us some opening remarks. Thank you, Susan.

Susan Orr (DMU)
Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to have a few moments to open this event today. I've not come across a witness seminar before, and I really welcome this innovation around process and about ways of doing things. I think what it really shines a light on for me is that you're here as individuals with individual expertise. You're here representing institutions with institutional expertise and then put those four institutions together and that collective expertise. I think you'll be really playing through those different levels of individual, institutional and collective expertise, sharing knowledge and by doing so, amplifying that knowledge because of course, you're all bringing insights. I hope you all finish and take home with you. Particular thanks for colleagues who joined us in Leicester today from their own universities. It's nearing the end of a long and exhausting term for all of us in the sector. So particularly grateful for colleagues who've prioritised this and have joined us in Leicester today. I hope you've got some great takeaways with all events like this. I'm sure some of them will be some of the most pithy moments, might be just in your coffee break. They might be at the table, but I know that you'll go back energised and full of commitment for the next steps of this project, we’ve got great themes in this project. It's come up through the way that you've introduced yourselves and what you're focusing on: transitions, peer communities, student-centred learning. You can't get much better than that for thematics to explore, if you're passionate about education as I know you all are. At DMU, we've got lots to learn from you at Glasgow Caledonian, UAL, and University of Brighton. and that's why we chose you. That's why we reached out to you as partners because we thought there's something we could learn from you. Hopefully you feel you've got things you can learn from us, but this is a very carefully curated group of four institutions, and I think that's where some of the magic is for this particular project. Of course, then it's more than the sum of the parts. I don't know all of you personally, but the very fact you're here today tells me that you're passionate about student learning and academic experience. I suspect there's probably areas that you are interested in in your university context, where it's quite hard to get anybody else interested in it, where there's not much traction. But retention is not like that. If you have an interest in retention in your institution, it's suddenly an area that everybody's interested in. OFS, B3 TEF, the cost, the financial implications of a student dropping out have all meant that there is fantastic traction to any conversation about retention. This isn't always true of areas that we are interested in in higher education, if we're committed to student learning, so we've got to exploit that. The fact that it's a strong lever for us to be interested in retention and to be making improvements in that area, it is an area where you can get the ear of your senior managers, you can get the ear of your Board of Governors because it's an interest and a focus for us. You're all taking responsibility in this project to use evidence to look at what works, to innovate around ideas about what might work. To pilot, to use data and to identify these critical sites of intervention. Whilst that might lead, in your institutions and indeed in our institutions, to a chart which has a positive trajectory of retention data going up. That's a chart we all want to see but, actually, that's not really what it's about for me. What it's about is in our universities, at this point of time, there are actual human beings with names, with life, stories with passion, who are studying on our courses and the work we do means that a few more of them, hopefully a lot more of them, but definitely a few more of them will feel held enough by our institutions to graduate and for that graduation to become part of their story and their lives and their futures. We all love the chart, but actually behind the chart will sit these students' stories. One of the biggest challenges I've had working on retention over the years for quite a few years now is sharing the idea that we can make a difference to retention, that there isn't an inevitability to drop out.  That often, we can say that students drop out because they're broke or they're hard up. Where we actually know, we retain students who are broke or hard up, and we've got to look at what we can do to make a difference to those students’ lives. It's a great process activity today. I love the way the event has been designed. You're bearing witness as well as being a witness. I'm really excited to see what comes out of it, and I'm really grateful that you've given me a chance just to come in at the beginning and say a few words. I wish you well over the course of your day.
Thank you.

Claire Orwin (DMU)
Thank you so much, Susan. It's really appreciated. I'm going to hand over to Nicola who's going to start us off with the questions. Thank you, Nicola.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Welcome everybody. Exciting to start, it begins: the witness seminar. The first section that we're going to be looking at is student transition; a really important part of the project. We're going to kick off with, what are the challenges in successfully transitioning students into university? Colin and Tracy, you've got your names down for this.

Colin Milligan (GCU)
At GCU, we've done a lot of work on trying to understand our student cohort. It's changing and I think that is really the challenge we face. Successful transition in 2024 is about recognising that your students aren't what they used to be 20 or 30 years ago when you could say most of our students come straight from school. They have all pretty much the same type of qualifications. Certainly, within courses they have very similar qualifications, and they all have largely the same expectations of what a university degree will give them. But that's really not the case anymore. At GCU, we've got lots of more flexible routes into higher education. We have graduate apprenticeships, which is a Scottish equivalent of degree apprenticeships. Those students, their primary identity is as an employee. We've got what's called articulating students, I don't know if you have them in England, but that's where students have studied for one or two years at college (and arrive with) Advanced Standing in second or third year of university in Scotland. They come and they have to integrate with already established peer groups, etcetera. More students have a declared disability. What we call our reasonable adjustments process have gone through the roof recently to the point where that's not sustainable, with the ways we used to do it. We've got mature students whose primary identity isn't being a student. They say just tell me what I've got to do to pass the course and get out in four years' time. I don't need to make friends; I need to get my assessments in on time. They're very mechanistic in the way they learn. There are a couple of other things. The engagement of students, especially after COVID, changed. The way I've described it in the past is we used to have students who would have part time jobs. Now, we have workers who think of themselves as students’ part of the time, and that's a really big change. It impacts the students, their approach coming on campus. They say, “I can't come on campus just for two lectures in the afternoon because it cost me £10 to get into the city, £10 to get out the city and I lose half a day's work”, etcetera. We have to really understand how our student demographic has changed. And then, like most universities in the UK, Glasgow Caledonian has increased its international PGT student numbers over the last five years. That's given us a different transition challenge. We often think of freshers' week and the induction as being something for undergraduates. But the challenge of bringing a student from a different educational tradition into the university, a shorter course because they're only studying for a year or 18 months, is a really big one. The problem we saw at first in our GCU London campus, which is only PGT, and then subsequently in our Glasgow campus, is the students arriving late. The problem with that is they are too focused on finding the supermarket, finding their accommodation, sorting their visa. They're not really interested in learning how to access the VLE or learning where their lectures are, etcetera. If they're arriving late, when they do arrive, they start to disrupt the other classes because they start to ask questions and they disrupt again. They find it difficult to integrate into the established peer groups of the students who might have been there from day one. That's a real challenge that we've seen. I think, together, the impact of all of this is that we recognise transition. We used to think about it as being something we can just do for the students. But now the needs of every individual student are different, and we have to think about how we can think of new ways to solve that problem, personalising the induction experience. 

Tracy Slawson (DMU)
I think my answers would mirror Colin's to a great extent. The diversity and complexity, and that's not just of the student body. The backgrounds, the cultures, the lived experiences, the non-linearity of the educational journey and experiences that they're arriving here with. But also, the diversity and the complexity of the different offers. As Colin said, work-based, direct entrance, apprenticeship programmes, multiple campuses and distance learning. All those aspects and then the difference of the expectations that the students are coming with. What university means, what it means to be a university student. What's a good experience? What does success look like? It's very diverse, it's very different for different students within our student body. As Colin referred to in his last point, there's also a problematising of what transition is and should look like in the university, against the concept of diversity and complexity. Maybe the idea of being inducted into an institution and students adjusting or assuming a particular identity, I think we need to look at that in a way of valuing the diversity of our student body, and the flexibility, and the adjustments on both sides of that. Rather than the student coming into the university. I think, related to that, because of the complexity and what we see in DMU is lots of initiatives happening for particular student groups at local levels and faculty levels, programmes, working with disabled students, working with international students, is the difficulty and challenge around an institution-wide transitions pedagogy, that means that we can have a coherent, integrated, coordinated approach that uses resource effectively and is effective for students, because what we see is repetition. Lots of things happening in lots of local areas, different language used. I think there's a sense sometimes that more is better. But what we see from some student groups is a sense of overwhelm, linked to coming into university. Lots of activity-trying, catch all those different points, but not necessarily the space for students to navigate all the tools to understand and shape their own version of that and have the confidence to do that. The other challenge that I see, because in my role I work quite a lot with neurodiverse students, is the shift in emphasis away from maybe a stepping up in terms of academic skills in transition, to the idea of community and belonging. In this institution, there's been a use of rhetoric over the last couple of years of “don't stand on the side lines and join in”. But I think we need to be careful about creating an idealised version of a successful student with the idea of joining in as well. Because that's quite different for students in terms of how they see that and how that makes them feel, and the version of that that is appropriate for them as well.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Excellent. Thank you both. There were some really interesting thoughts for us to kick off with. This is the next question: What activities, then, have been successful in your institution in helping to retain students during this period? Same speakers.

Colin Milligan (GCU)
One of the key things that I see is, especially with our more heterogeneous student population, is that they've got a lot to offer. One of the keys to actually thinking about successfully transitioning them into the universities, is to take advantage of what they offer.
Think about what having worked for a period before studying means to their motivations. I might have said it was mechanistic, but actually they've got an understanding of what the workplace is like. They've got an understanding of what type of role they want to have. It's really important to think of the positives as well as maybe outline the challenges. At GCU, I think having been involved in various different activities around GCU, one of the first ones I thought of was a recognition of the challenge faced by late arriving PGT students. There was a scholarship project that I supported a few years ago where they were still trying to get their head around what the problem was because in a way it almost crept up on them. We did a lot of work with students, and they came up with a course that the students could take on arrival and they worked with PGR students to develop that course to give us a lived experience element of the course. That gave things like very quick early feedback on English for academic purposes, and academic writing, because students had an induction assessment. They had to complete a short period of writing. As I say, student-led activities, student-led content in the VLE by actually engaging with something in the VLE. But of course, some of that stuff didn't actually solve the problem of late arrival. As Tracy says, that keyword – overwhelm – is something that I think all students can have the potential to experience during induction and soon after. Basically, it's the international PGT students who really suffer. As I say, their time here is short. Any time that they do miss by arriving late is almost multiplied. In our health school, we recognise this is a particular problem and what we did is we took a lot of things out of the first week induction and actually put it into a week 6 induction and we made sure that that they didn't lack any essential information. But we made sure, for instance, that week 6 inductions were before any initial assessments. They got to ask questions about assessment. I think that was really important to try and start to make a lengthened induction. There's actually a welcome event six weeks in. It was a social event. All the key people in the faculty were there and the school were there in terms of the international reps, programme leads, etcetera. The other thing they did was they got students to create content again following GCU London's example, they got students to create content. It was simple content. It was things like, what's a cèilidh dance? Why do Scottish people use the word “messages” instead of “shopping”? Where's the best place to get your local type of food in Glasgow? It's absolutely baseline information and that was written by the students from their own lived experience. That was good. We have probably over 1000 students joining us with advanced standing into second or third year of university in Scotland having previously studied at college. We run transition courses for those students. Mindful that however hard we try, it's almost akin to the theory-practice gap. There's the college-university gap. However hard the colleges try to prepare students for university and however hard the university tries to understand the needs of articulating students. There's always a gap, so we've developed courses to try and bridge that gap and they go down really well with our students. In terms of engagement, we see ourselves still as a face-to-face university and we put a lot of effort in trying to think of how the campus can be focused and say: if your course can be delivered on campus, do deliver on campus. There has been a bit of pushback from staff. Ultimately, it's a guideline. A delivery principle rather than a mandate. There is opportunity to bend the rules, but it has been really important.

Tracy Slawson (DMU)
In some respects, this question's quite hard for me to answer from the role that I have and the perspective that I sit in. It's hard to collate this information for DMU as an institution. We do have, that's just been created in draft, a framework for induction and transition which is starting to collate the different activities. I think some of the most successful activities that the university has done are done at a local and a bespoke level. Some of that I'm aware of in terms of the activities that are very successful to support international students, and that's often by faculty. I know the Business and Law faculty has a very particular approach, and likewise with disability, different things are put in place for specific identified groups of students, like students on the autism spectrum. We have something called New to DMU that starts pre-induction and looks at all those different things. I think some of the activities that are particularly successful in terms of what I hear and what I talk to colleagues about are those that are embodied in identifiable people. So again, it's a law for international students. They can have international personal tutors who work with groups who are a person of contact and likewise in disability advice and support, they have transition and retention officers and people that are identified to go to and support and help. In terms of one of the things that I can talk to a little bit more is the project I'm involved in that we did the case study for, which is DMU BaseCamp in terms of success and engagement. Some of the other things that I've been involved in peripherally and that I'm aware of are the activities that we do around onboarding, pre-induction and induction, which are kind of generic, they're tailored slightly in terms of faculty and programme, but there's a lot of generic content as well and they're front-loaded. What we've seen really is low levels of engagement. The feedback on those activities is quite positive, but the levels of engagement are really quite low. Even if students start engaging with those activities, they don't complete them or they don't see them through. They're the activities that are given to students in a traditional induction way at the start of the year. What we have seen with DMU BaseCamp, which is a transitions resource that's there for the whole student journey, so it's not front loaded. They're made aware of it, but there's no activities, there's no engagement prompted or expected as soon as they come to us. We have actually seen really good levels of engagement and the other thing about BaseCamp is that it's personalisable. It has the induction stuff, the stuff you need to know. Then it has stuff to develop and to personalise, and also layers of reflection built in so that students can adjust and interact with that and the levels of engagement with that are much higher. We know that, across faculties, we've got 81% of Level 4 students engaging with it, 74% in another faculty. Slightly lower in one of the other faculties because they also have specific induction materials like ASK BAL. Business and Law are having similar things that sit alongside, so the engagement is slightly lower. Level 4 engagement, in terms of the data, is very high with the resource and the qualitative feedback suggests that what students like particularly about it is the fact that it's always there and they come back to it at their own point of need, rather than being told it at a point of need that's designated by the institution. You could say that students are maybe just going to it because they've been told about it. When they get there, they don't find it useful. But again, we've got qualitative feedback that says that they do find it useful and different things on that. The other thing about BaseCamp, we can't link it to retention in any way, but we can look at engagement, is it's designed for staff to contextualise. What we hear from students all the time is they want it to feel relevant, they want it through their programme, they want it through their lecturers, and they want some of that work done to show it's relevant before they engage with the information. It's available to all staff and we know that 1/3 of staff have accessed it. When you think about student-facing staff, that's a higher percentage, again. The other thing that we know about it, in terms of its usefulness, is it has an announcements function on it because it sits in our VLE. We use it very sparingly because it goes out to all students, the announcements. But immediately on making announcements about learning developments, things around academic skills and academic writing is, for example, the very first announcement we did on it was about a programme of workshops that we run. Overnight we had about 100 extra bookings, which was double what we'd already had. As well, we have a Royal Literary Fund Fellow that supports students with writing, and they had very few bookings. They weren't being used or utilised. Within hours of doing the BaseCamp announcement, they were fully booked for the whole term. I think in terms of data being able to prove engagement, that's what I can share really. But as a university, I think understanding that picture, there's quite a lot of work to do in terms of that coordination. And again, that transitions pedagogy of understanding the big picture.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Fantastic. Thank you both. That's really interesting and varied examples there. The next question that we're moving on to, we've got Colin again and Claire this time. What are the key points to the student life cycle where students are most at risk of not continuing with their studies?

Claire Orwin (DMU)
For me, and reflecting on this question, there's different types and styles about where students aren't continuing. We have students that take a break in their learning with the intention to come back. Maybe they have difficulties during the year, or challenges, and they want to leave a level and return to restart that level the following year. Obviously, those students don't necessarily impact continuation negatively. But then we've got students that leave because they maybe don't find university suitable for them for many reasons. Then also those students who get terminated from their programme. When I looked at our data around this, typically, in terms of peaks of students "dropping out" for the want of a better expression, our academic year often starts at the start of October and it's that October period where we have students most at risk, and that's often for more personally-orientated reasons. It could be medical, but a lot of that might be more associated with students not necessarily settling to university, or finding that quite difficult. There's an interesting thing for me as well in terms of the students coming into the university reflecting on what's been said. Because you've got who you recruit, you've then got who you register. You've then got who you enrol and then you've got who actually arrives. That's also quite a change in position, I think, and similar across the sector. The other key peaks are more around academic failure perhaps, which tend to be at our main assessment board. Then at our reassessment board where you'll get that compounding of failure. I think what's interesting is when looking at that concept of academic failure, a lot of it seems to stem back to non-submission, non-engagement rather than necessarily the fact of recruiting students and them not being fit for task. Not being able to successfully succeed, and I think what's interesting where you've got multiple components in modules is how you see that. Because you might get a low module mark which might suggest a student hasn't succeeded. But in reality, probably behind that is something that's been missed and, again, links back to engagement. To me they're the key points and I think that concurs with things in the sector like ‘What work’s’, student retention and success programme outcomes. They also reference this period that we're just coming up to now, in particular students going home for Christmas and not necessarily wanting to come back, which is also a real challenge. What's really interesting about this is we tend to collect data based on when the students cease their engagement. Based on last date of attendance, that's what students loan companies use. What lots of institutions use. But to me what's interesting is what is that golden window of possible intervention? From students, noting those key peaks. What is that period where we could influence those students? For me, one of the key periods is those first four weeks of university and I think what you were saying before, both of you, in terms of pre-induction, induction, transition into that first part of learning is that really critical point and then managing and support as we move forward.

Colin Milligan (GCU)
I think at GCU we have got largely the same issues in terms of the profile of dropping out and non-continuing’s through the year is very similar. I've got on my list "never got started". I think that is the key one as you've identified. What is it? If a student decides to study with us, why is it that they never get started and drop out? When we have had a chance to engage them, but we haven't managed to engage them, what is it that's missing from those initial meetings that we need to fix, and we need to address? I really listened into what Claire was saying about, we notice when they don't submit an assessment or whatever, but actually the problem is before that, it's not really about the assessment. Definitely first assessment is where we tend to notice we don't have any learning analytics in our VLE. That was our policy decision some time ago. So, we don't actually look at student engagement through the VLE. We don't ever see things until that first electronic submission comes in. We've got a particular challenge at GCU. We've got a lot of allied health professionals and nursing students and, this is quite historical, but one of the things our nursing faculty will tell us is that they do six weeks of study and then they go into practice for the first six weeks as a nurse working in practice. And that point, which is mid-November, coincides when the point at which all the students are getting extra hours for if they're working in shops or pubs and suddenly it hits them. Why can't we prepare them and say, “yes, it's all right for you to have a part time job, but you've got to do 1800 hours of practice”. It's a really heavy workload, specifically in the nursing courses, in terms of the amount of practice time. However much we try and prepare them, there is actually that sort of "oh yeah, I can do it". Then suddenly, it's like, "oh, I've got five shifts as a nurse and five shifts as a cashier". And that's a problem that we had. Then I just wanted to remind, because I've got an example for the next point, is that point at the end of year exam is a key point in which we can really think about how we can support students if they don't pass them, to make sure that they get through the second round.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Fantastic. Thank you both. Picking up on a similar thing: What activities, then, have been effective in retaining students through those periods? What's been working?

Claire Orwin (DMU)
What's been interesting is, myself and a colleague did a bit of work around student belonging, coming into the institution that was internal. Building those relationships just seems to be really critical, which obviously it's probably no surprise to anybody, but it's that familiarity with staff and students. What we found when we spoke to students about this was it was about providing structured opportunities, not assuming that those would naturally take place. Thinking about the timing of those, people did very well-meaning pizza lunches with students too early. The students just felt incredibly uncomfortable and wouldn't talk to the staff and likewise the staff were trying to cajole, and it wasn't really the right time. It's trying to think about those. What's been successful has been those really structured activities where there's a real sense of purpose in those. Something that came up as part of that work was something our architecture team do, and they do a walk-and-talk around the city. They take students around to buildings, talk about the architecture and it came up time and time again with those particular groups of students as being something that was really impactful because it was the casual conversations that went alongside that. That was quite an interesting thing that was embedded, obviously more generically the things that then do feed in and support the course are around following up on non-attendance or poor attendance. We have some institutional wide processes that are more to do with non-compliance. But also, in terms of reaching out to students, there's very much an ethos of locally programme teams reaching out to students who aren't in session. These things are very important for servicing issues and signposting and, I think, speaks to that concept of belonging and mattering that someone's noticed you haven't been there, and someone's actually reached out to you. Thinking about it from the sticky courses point of view, I think that's important, and particularly noticing that our first years, or our new to university students, are highest at risk of not continuing. A lot of those first years. Year Zero Level 3 entrance into foundation often come from highly structured environments and then we give them this whole big transition and lots of flexibility. I think for us the transition to block teaching is really interesting because we know we're teaching in these seven-week blocks. We've just been looking at the module achievement that those students have done. We have those points where we've got that formal review of a module and we can see who's engaging, who's not engaging. What's the pattern of success for those? That's been really helpful for teams to be able to spend the time looking at the themes. What's happening, what's working, and raising those challenges around engagement. It's definitely been that pattern of students not being able to engage that's made that difference. Obviously, there's things about making sure students get the right swift support, which is important. There's been some interesting things embedded in that into programmes. Having people into programmes to talk to students rather than just the associated types of activities that Tracy talked about. I think that makes a real difference and normalises some of that. That actually, it's OK not to be OK. People can have those shared conversations. It's trying to think as well about pedagogy. I know we're talking about that a little bit later, but how we can bring students and give them the value of being here when they study. Because there was some work done by Greenwich, Nottingham Trent, and Portsmouth and one of the areas they picked out was that pedagogical issue about students have got to see the importance of being here and make sessions really count for them to attend, when they looked at why students weren’t attending post-COVID. I think those sorts of things and some work that Alasdair's been doing around that's been affected in terms of trying to improve that.

Colin Milligan (GCU)
I think probably the reason I'm involved in this project is last year, we did take a look at what was working around induction because we were aware that induction is becoming less fit for purpose at GCU. We at least wanted to understand what was working and added the qualitative analysis of the data that came out of our, what we call, 'New to GCU' survey. That was the students who engaged with induction and engage with the survey. So, it's a self-selecting group, but what really came out of that is I really saw the students’ appetite to learn and engage in those initial weeks of induction. I think we have to think about how we maintain that and really leverage that initial enthusiasm that they have. The students were desperate to make friends. I've written it down here as an anxiety. But it's not an anxiety about making friends, it's about an understanding that making friends is going to be key. But they also wanted to know: what are the staff like? Are the staff that are teaching me going to be nice? What are the other staff in the department like? What are the former students like? It's really all of these people, not just the student-student or the student-tutor dynamics. All of these relationships are really important. Another thing that really struck me was how important place was. In fact, before I even analysed the data, I think it was probably the same day, I was on my way over to an office. On another part of the campus and I heard a student saying "where is it? Where are we going to study?" I don't think anything of it. Then I opened up the data and time after time there were students saying "I really liked the campus tours because it gave me a real feel for where I was going to be studying", "I knew where my course was going to be, or my lectures were going to be", "I got to sit in the lecture theatres that I was going to sit in". That's really important and we really underestimate things like that in the sense of place that the students have. They were really trivial things like exams and assessments - when are they going to be? What format did they take? Etcetera. As I say, I think what we need to do is leverage some of these key things and say: We might not be able to have credit bearing induction, but we can take advantage of the enthusiasm to really say, actually, this is a point where we've got their full attention. They're really thinking about their university career. Tell them all the key things that matter about it, but that only works for the students who come into induction. We know that a significant minority almost half of students don't engage through the face-to-face induction week. At GCU we try to address this, and I don't have any evidence yet. Might never have any evidence, but one of the things that I did last year is that we had all these resources through the ‘New to GCU’ survey, that we knew weren't being used. We had a resource on plagiarism. We had a resource on effective learning. We had a resource on intercultural competence, we had a resource on using the VLE. There are five different resources that we had developed for the students, and we saw that they weren't really being used. Some of them things like being an effective learner, you think, why aren't they using that access? Academic misconduct and plagiarism. We know that it's something that students are painfully aware of, and they're told, and there's lots of messaging around it. So why aren't they accessing these? And rather than tell them where they were in week one, we tried to design a resource for staff that gave them a simple timetable of how they could deliver it. What we looked at is in the first trimester because it's trimesters at GCU. We designed a 12-week set of activities. We interspersed these resources with a set of classroom activities. The resources; learning how to use the VLE came first because you can't really make much progress and then you make sure that they knew about assessment plagiarism before the first assessment. We organised these in a logical order and then what we did was intersperse them with very simple classroom activities that built on them. There's an activity called the Treasure Hunt, which was after they had viewed the resource on how to navigate around the VLE. The next week there was a treasure hunt activity where they were actually given a task to do. Find out where you access Turnitin. Find out where you access the resource leading list, etcetera. Then we built in belonging type activities where they got to work in pairs and fours and in eights then in whole classes, etcetera. We used a model whereby we said what the activity was, said if it was suitable for online and face-to-face. Said whether it's suitable for small or large classes. We used a colour-coding system to make that easy. Then we gave the advice on how they could adapt it to their own needs, so they didn't actually have to do exactly what was in the learning activity and these were all delivered just as PowerPoint slides plus a bit of text around it. We don't have any evidence of whether that worked, but the idea was to give the staff who wanted to do just that a menu of things to do, and it didn't say you have to do all 12/13 things. If you know that your students are going to be being assessed soon, give them this assessment thing and this will help them navigate around, GCU Learn, etcetera.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Lots of really good ideas there. Now we've moved on to reflections from the audience. We've got 10 minutes now till 11:00 to feed into those conversations that have been started by the various speakers.

Leanne Grice (UAL)
Can I ask a question about something that Colin just said? I know you can't comment on the impact of it at the moment, but I was just wondering the direction that you gave staff to use certain things at certain points. So, if it was around assessment just before students were going to do assessment, what was the take up from that by staff and did they actually follow that?

Colin Milligan (GCU)
Well, that was the issue. Just the way we were working with the induction leads in the three schools, but it was then up to them to transmit that to their programme leaders, and I have a feeling that they didn't transmit it very effectively. Which is a shame, because I can't do anything. I don't have any control over those people. I can only work with people who came forward to me. So, it is frustrating and part of the challenge is that we know that probably 60% or 70% of staff won't need that guidance because they're doing it anyway. But it's that other 30%. We need to find ways of convincing them that, actually the difference between a mediocre course and a great course is very little. It's just about saying, actually, what do all my individual students need now in this course? They don't need to know about political history. They need to know why they're learning political history. I always give the example of statistics for nursing students. Nursing students are not going to want to learn statistics. But if you situate it within a conversation around evidence-based practice, then they'll say, “OK, I'll learn a wee bit of statistics to get me to be a better nurse and to be able to communicate with my colleagues”.

Leanne Grice (UAL)
We've had a similar issue. We've got a Unit 1 Good Practice Guide which is around transition, it's an intro to your first unit that you do at university, and we've got a lot of tools that we put out to staff. But whether they're using them, and we actually did some research a couple years ago that found that people weren't using it as much as they perhaps should have been. So, it's that thing about, how do we get people to use these resources and guidance?

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
It's quite similar to our challenges around student engagement and getting the staff to take up the resources. It almost feels like we have to convince people that it's the right thing to do, or it would be useful for them and for their students as well, just to echo Leanne's point. I have another question for you, Colin. Just some really interesting stuff that's come out of what you've said about the intro to guidance and in an institution like UAL, which is vast and the colleges do sometimes function in silo. There's also now more work going on around Unit 1 or Intro To and revisiting that at other colleges, and I guess some of the questions that we are asking are around the original work that Leanne was part of, for example. With the Intro To good practice guide and how much that's being referred to in the newer projects doing similar things. So, there's that overlap in good practice with all the best intentions. But the work is being done and then the take up is hard to really evidence. Colin, I was really interested in what you were talking about in terms of the students that ‘never got started’ and around that first submission point being the point where we realised that there's been disengagement, or the student hasn't really fully been part of the course from the beginning, and that sometimes being too late. Our first submission point for year 1 is around week 6-7 of the course depending on the course. My question was connected to you saying you are trialling an attendance monitoring. Has that helped this year in early identification?

Colin Milligan (GCU)
All I've heard about the attendance monitoring is that no one likes it. Students don't like it; staff don't like it. I think the problem was is that the old system was open to abuse and they've tried to resolve some of the abuses of it. It's difficult because I think a lot of this is driven by UKVI legislation. We'd much rather work out why the students need to be there rather than just demand that they're there. I've got some sympathy for when staff don't like these things. But no, I don't have any data. I'm sorry.

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
We're in a very similar position with attendance monitoring at UAL.

Alasdair Blair (DMU)
Can I ask a question? It's a bit left field, but it isn't a point of transitions. A lot of the things you're talking about has been a little bit about how do we support, how do we control, how do we maintain students at the university engagement, etcetera. I was also wondering how do we incentivise staff to drive that transition? For example, if members of staff had been teaching a module and everyone progressed, would we give them a bonus payment? Should universities be thinking differently? In terms of how do we support and ensure students transition and engage properly. Because at the moment a lot of thinking is on control. You must attend. You must be there. You must do this tick box. Every member of staff does that fantastically. There's no reward. Are we asking the right questions?

Catherine McConnell (UoB)
In response to that, I feel like a lot of the focus of our activities and interventions is on how we can control the students and what we can put in place and in front of the students to incentivise or to monitor their engagement. I was in a centre for learning and teaching before I'm in this role now. I do empathise with the staff engagement piece, and I was wondering, as Leanne was asking her question and Colin was responding about, whether if you've got set resources that we're giving staff to implement, whether there's the lack of co-creation for that staff member to engage with the thought process behind. If you know that you're going in front of a group of students and you're taking something off the shelf, it's a bit nerve racking to just go and deliver someone else's materials. But if there was some way that we could involve staff or allow them and enable them to co-create.

Tracy Slawson (DMU)
What we try to do with BaseCamp is create that kind of resource. We did quite a lot of staff workshops and awareness raising about the idea of contextualising. We've made this resource. We've made these pieces; they cover all the key areas including the templates and the reflective pieces because we have a section on feedback. To try and help and support students to take those parts. Some staff have done that really creatively. We talked earlier about international students joining courses late, so in terms of making scavenger hunts around the resource and different things. We've also worked with the APSEs, which is the Associate Professors of Student Experience, and they have responsibility for the idea of yearlong induction. They send out emails to staff which signpost to certain sections of the resource. The idea is that they're completely contextualised within programme or discipline identity, but there are resources there with some activities that you can take out piece by piece. That's the idea, but it's still something new to engage with and to investigate. The idea is that you do co-create. The other thing we've talked about is, it's a bit like some of the work Colin's done, the idea of almost playlists from the resource. Off the shelf for Level 4 or Level 5 or international students, who comes to the course late. But there's limitations on the resource and the technology. What we also tried to do, linked to that, is use Teams to create a staff hub of sharing of good practice. When they create these bespoke resources, they could share them and then understand, but we had, I think, one contribution to that. So yes, it's a challenge.

Colin Milligan (GCU)
I did some work a few years ago. It was just a digital experience survey and analysing data from that and it showed me how staff trust their colleagues. We talked about this last night over dinner with Claire, about what's the right level for our community to form something, you have to seed a lot to a certain discipline. But actually, it's about who you know, the other people on your programme or the other people who teach on your module, you'll get your practice from them, and you'll improve your practice, and you'll get your signals about whether your practice is good enough for them. I think we need to think of ways in which we can bring that back to the whole institution, because otherwise there's not any incentive to share. Because if you do have something to share, you just share it to your pal who's in the next office. But at GCU we've wanted to try and really build on academic leadership and say: You're professionals. You should be sitting down after every lecture you deliver. After every learning experience you deliver, you should be sitting down and saying: "how could I have done that better?". We don't really have that on the ground. Some staff will do it, but some staff are just happy to say: "I've delivered it, that's that. My students are all progressing to the next year, I must be doing a great job", and they don't think about themselves.

Tracy Slawson (DMU)
One thing, on a slightly different note, that we've done here, because Jason and I work in the Centre for Learning and Study Support. We do a lot of in-faculty teaching anyway, so we have relationships with them. We did, a number of years ago, create a suite of resources that are called ‘Stepping Up’. They're for all those different levels of transition. We initially created them, firstly, for second years because that idea of the sophomore slump when we thought about what they were getting and then we created it across all the points of transition and delivered it on a central open programme for students to come to. But what we then got asked to do, because we already had the materials, was deliver it in faculty, but co-deliver it. We very much had the programme voice. What happened then organically over the years is those ‘Stepping Up’ interventions which was towards the start of the year for each level of study, really began to look very different on each of the programmes as the staff took that in more and more in terms of what they didn't think was relevant, what they thought was relevant, what feedback looked like. What we ended up was with keeping the name "Stepping Up to…" but arranged depending on the programme of very, very different content. So that was quite interesting. What you could see was very much where the lecturers on certain programmes placed the value of the needs of those students. That was quite interesting and maybe something we should capture to see what those pictures look like.

Part 2: Peer communities

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
It sounds really interesting. I think that's a good point to end and move on to the next section, because that's the peer community of learning between staff and different parts of the university. It leads us in quite nicely to student communities as well and that's the next bit we're moving on to. We've got Catherine and Alex and Jason. Why are peer communities important in supporting retention across the student journey?

Alex Cazaly (UoB)
Peer communities is something we're very much focusing on right now at the University of Brighton and also within our team, the student skills hub, and it's a key part of implementing our action on participation plan that is very relevant to this idea of retention, as one of the concerns in the action and participation plan are certain demographics of students being more likely to at certain points leave their courses and not return. The idea for us when it comes to peer communities, it very much comes back to a lot of the stuff that's been said about transition and the challenges that students face when transitioning into university. I also really liked that it's not just about front-loading stuff at the start of the course, but rather making sure that there's support across the student's journey and for us, peer communities are one of our key methods to implement that support across the student journey, because there's a really strong element of sustainability when it comes to peer communities as they are student-led in themselves and the idea is that if you can demonstrate the value of this peer learning, this peer community to students early on, but also continually throughout the course then it's not necessarily even something that academic staff have to implement themselves across the course, because the students will eventually take ownership of the community, of their learning, and continue that across the course and across their journey as a student, and that can look very different depending on your course, depending on if it's curricular or co-curricular or extracurricular. I think that's another really strong element about peer communities. This flexibility for academic staff, for professional services, for the students themselves, to design that and picture that however they feel is most relevant to them, and most important to them. And again, going back to some stuff that was said in the last section, students have become very diverse, more so over the past decade or so and are coming from very different backgrounds and very different expectations. And I think peer communities are really necessary. Especially when it comes to this flexibility to make sure that those students actually are able to shape their own experience in a way that is appropriate for them that meets what they want out of the university. That might be more academic focused. For example, with mature students. As was said before, a lot of mature students come in and think, "I'm not here necessarily to make friends I'm here to get a qualification". And peer communities, although there is a social element, you can focus that on academics. It can be a very curricular format, but then also you have students, perhaps, who've come from very far away. They've travelled to a university from the other side of the country, or a completely different country, and actually they really need to build that sense of social belonging to feel at home at the university. You can shape your peer community to very much fulfil that need in students. I think the key thing, just to finish off, is not just ensuring that the framework is in place, but that your framework is one that students can adapt themselves and take ownership of.

Catherine McConnell (Brighton)
Just to echo what Alex is saying, and how we're trying to create a value or a principle of peer communities and learning communities at Brighton, which has been important for about 15 years and probably before that as well, but wasn't looked at in a consistent way. We started a long time ago by looking at peer learning in an academic context and quite a formal method as well, where two students in second year to third year would be mentoring first years in groups and it was very structured around academics, about challenging module content. Rather than picking off target groups and using it as something that would fix problematic students, it was always about challenging content. Making the transition and maybe threshold concepts in terms of what students are struggling with their course. But I've seen over the years that we have moved into a space where we're looking at different groupings of students that would benefit from peer communities because of the additional benefits that you outlined, Alex, which are about belonging and about a sense of connection, involvement in this student experience, orientation to the university and also helping manage expectations and build confidence. I think for the University of Brighton, now we're seeing it as something that does a bit of both really. We're thinking about it in a horizontal way, so thinking about peers that are within their cohort and thinking about how they can benefit from the community in the classroom, active learning. Building up that model, Tracy, that you described about working in pairs, groups and then bigger. And then also in a vertical way, thinking about how students that are near peers, just ahead of that student journey, can support those students coming in. We're trying to think about it in a multitude of different ways now.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
Catherine and Alex said it very well in terms of, what we're talking about in terms of peer. But just to highlight what comes out of those characterisations, when we talk about peer learning or peer communities, what we're really talking about is a diversity. Different forms of interaction. When you're looking at the research evidence, is this effective for retention and attainment? There is quite a lot of evidence that suggests that it is. But one of the issues with looking across that evidence base is that we're talking about different things at different times. Whether you're talking about near peers, as Catherine was saying, or buddies, whether you're talking about peer tutoring or coaching forms, there's lots of different things that we're talking about when we're talking about peers. Whether that's formal mentoring schemes or something that's happening within a classroom setting, whether that's integrated into the curriculum or whether it's co-curricular or completely outside of that. So, it's important to recognise that it has lots of incarnations. But broadly speaking, the evidence is really quite clear in the literature that it does improve retention, belonging and attainment. There's a number of reasons how it does that, and I'm quite interested in the mechanisms as to why it works. And how it works. Because I think it does speak to the things that Colin, Claire and Tracy were talking about to begin with in terms of transition. There was a recent meta-analysis of 72 studies. They identified six areas where in terms of social integration, academic integration, university life adaptation. So, these are all the kind of things that we're talking about in terms of transition and induction as well. They also talk about career benefits, emotional benefits and soft skill development as well and broadly speaking, when you look across that. Particularly when you look at that soft skill development that's going on with students, it reduces stress and anxiety, it improves motivation and decision making, so those are the reasons as to why. We could look deeper into the mechanisms, the psychological mechanisms as to how it's working as well. But I think that's important to make that link when the first speakers were talking about transition, there's a whole lot of stuff around peer that just came to mind.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
That's great. Thank you very much. What peer community activities have you utilised and what has been the impact of those? What’s gone well?

Catherine McConnell (Brighton)
As I mentioned in the previous question, we run a really formal peer assisted learning scheme, which is based on an international model of something called Supplemental Instruction, but that's a very US phrase. But to put it into context, in the UK, peer assisted learning or peer assisted study sessions. And that's where two students from Level 5 or 6, that's second and third year would be, recruited, trained and supervised to facilitate, not teach, facilitate study group sessions with first years and it's quite a renowned and documented model. Like I said before, it focuses on the challenging content rather than challenging students. That went really, really well for about 10 years and then COVID hit. The model is very much based on an in-person model to get students in the room, running alongside modules and engaging in their course content, giving each other exam revision questions, or just building up their confidence to speak. Ask the questions that they wouldn't feel comfortable asking in front of lecturers. They would be able to ask them in a small group, in a safe space. When COVID came along, we found it really difficult to move that online. It was difficult enough to move teaching online, let alone helping the students to facilitate those. But I know of some universities that did actually manage to really make it happen online in terms of a model for peer learning. We are in the stage now, four years later, trying to rebuild that. But we're rebuilding it in a new way. I feel like we're not just focusing on the learning, and it's called peer communities within our access and participation plan and the rationale and proposal that we're putting together on that.

Alex Cazaly (Brighton)
One of the things that we found is that actually there are a lot of different types and levels of formality, types of peer learning schemes, or even peer mentoring schemes already existing in the University of Brighton, and the more we look into this, the more that seem to pop up. It's really brilliant and we're finding that they're very successful, but there isn't necessarily an awareness or cohesiveness in the university that these schemes exist, that this practice can be shared. Because of course, it's always important to share good practice. The peer communities project that we've been focusing on, and is identified in our access and participation plan, is very much about how we can actually bring this together under a framework that we can provide to different parts of the university. Whether this be academic schools creating curricular, types of peer learning or peer mentoring schemes or focusing more on extracurricular ones run by either our team or us supporting other teams to run these. We're at a stage now where we're starting to develop our peer community projects focusing on our at-risk courses to support them and improve their retention attainment, progression and also outcomes for students, focusing on NSS as well. We're taking quite a flexible approach, so we've had discussions with the schools. For example, we've talked to Architecture and Computer Science, and they have very different needs. So, we're really hoping to create different strands of these peer communities that teams in the university can adopt according to the needs of their students. For example, it might be a more vertical mentoring scheme like Catherine mentioned earlier, in which you have Level 6 students supporting those in Level 4. Or for example, in our Psychology course, they've started setting up study groups in which it's more a horizontal peers supporting peers. And actually, although the psychology team have provided a framework for those sessions, the psychology students are independently running those sessions, organising their meetings and taking ownership over that learning. Which is really fantastic to see. The peer communities project that we're developing is very much about promoting and providing the resources to continue that and grow that in the university.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
That's brilliant. Thank you for that... Jason.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
De Montfort takes a very similar approach to Brighton, and we recognise that diversity of approaches as well. A community like De Montfort's, 20 or 30 thousand people, it's like a small town. The challenge in the things that Alex and Catherine are saying is, if you like capturing that and seeing it, it's intuitively sensible that peers, that students learn from each other alongside their formal curriculum. We know this and everybody knows this. One of the challenges, in some ways, is if you like capturing and being able to evaluate some of the things that are going on. Talking about student overwhelm in the first section, there's also an issue of staff overwhelm as well. Lots of staff would like to do more stuff than peers but just don't simply feel they have the time to do it, or the resources at their disposal to do it. It would be nice. One of the issues that we have in trying to support this is the extent to which we intervene, and if you like, insist on data collection and the extent to which we draw back and let them just do it without extra work. That's the challenge in some ways. We are looking at developing an evaluative framework that is soft touch, that is localised and allows that local contextualisation without insisting on more work for our colleagues to do, because that's an impediment to actually implementing some of the stuff or putting your head above the parapet and telling everybody about it. Because if I tell you that I'm doing a peer thing, "that's OK. I've got some forms for you to fill out". But as Alex was saying, we want to be able to share good practices. We want to be able to show colleagues and everybody and students as well that we can use this form of learning to help solve our problems and to improve the education of everyone involved.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
That's brilliant. The next question leads us actually back nicely to what you were saying about with COVID. How can online platforms be used as part of the solution, not just for learning, but for building community and belonging?

Catherine McConnell (Brighton)
We're at a very early stage with online communities, but what we've focused on for this project is to look at an initiative that our recruitment and outreach team have been using. Where there's a pre-packaged platform that's external to the university, but that we've adopted whereby students can be enrolled onto the whole platform and then within it they can create communities or the university can create some communities for the students to join, and it's been really interesting to see that unfold because the popularity is around hobbies. At one point, the Dungeons and Dragons community was the most popular one, or the Swifties. They were being able to connect based on some aspect of their identity rather than just an FAQ place for questions. However, that was really important to students as well. Pre-arrival has been quite a key place where we've been looking at online community building. We ran some focus groups very hot off the press last week and found that students were keen to speak to other applicants and we are using it as a conversion tool as well, so trying to show students what Brighton's like and what you're coming into and for that purpose. But students were saying that they really wanted to speak to students already on their course. So, we're going back to this horizontal applicant to applicant, or vertical applicant to current student and so it's been really helpful for us to hear that voice and to think about it in the way that we could get current students involved in talking to applicants. I'm sure you're already doing this. The benefit of having that online platform, it also means that it's asynchronous so students can access it in their own time 24/7, hopefully not expecting a response immediately, but managing their expectations and playing to the strengths of the online platform, which is that it doesn't have to be that everybody's sitting at a computer at the same time or on their phone at the same time. But that asynchronicity gives students the opportunity to think through what they're saying, to use it as a discussion board and to wait for the responses that come back and quite a few students have used it as a springboard to set up groups on their own platform, using WhatsApp or the platform that they might feel a bit more comfortable with. Obviously, though, there we don't then have as much control over, or perhaps any control over what's being discussed, whether the advice is that's being given is accurate and is representing the university in the way that we would want to, but we can't stop online communities starting. So, it's been a good way to try and bring that under the university's observation and moderation. 

Alex Cazaly (Brighton)
I think this is also really key to have this online community and, especially if it is asynchronous or even if it's not, is in terms of accessibility and there's different types of students that might find digital peer community far more accessible than physical peer community. For example, some of our team members this term have established a neurodivergent study group. That's been going really well and for a lot of the students who are part of the group, they feel a lot more confident to engage socially when with their neurodivergent peers, but also some of them experience their neurodivergence in a way where their confidence is higher engaging digitally compared to physically. We've experimented with running that study group online and actually we're going to evaluate that. From what I understand so far, this is a good way to increase engagement for students who, perhaps, they don't have the confidence to come in physically but are quite happy to do it online. Again, if it's asynchronous that provides more areas for engagement, even if the student doesn't have that confidence yet. I think also, going beyond that, a lot of universities have different campuses, students might not be able to get to the same campus to meet. So if you have the digital platform for your peer community as well, you can increase engagement. We have a lot more commuting students as well. A lot more students are living at home and commuting in rather than moving into student accommodation or into a student house share rather than having to make a long journey just for what they might see as a social engagement or something supplemental, rather than course of their curriculum, they might think "that's something I want to engage with" if they have the digital option as well as the physical option.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
Just to echo what Alex is saying, I think digital plays an important part of that diverse offer. I think for, certainly forms of interaction, it's probably the most appropriate, particularly where there's off-campus engagement. As part of the project, Claire and I set up something called The Placement Network, which was designed for placement students. One of the things that we talked about in establishing that is, mentoring or peer learning tends to work best where there's a shared interest, where there's some sort of differential in knowledge and experience between the participants and where there's a clear point of transition or transformation taking place in terms of the student experience. We thought placements would be a really good place for them because it works across the different programmes. It's got quite a big grouping, and they don't otherwise have contact with the university. One of the issues with digital, of course, though is that the engagement can be quite low. You have issues with the platform, you have issues with the technology. Yet another thing to learn. The meta-analysis I mentioned before, they talk about some of the issues with the digital forms of mentoring. It provides less in terms of that psychological support and social integration. There's a lower willingness to participate and I think that's because it's difficult to establish a trusting connection between people. If you're putting out there "I want help or assistance with something" to 200 people you've never met before. It's a bit of an impediment to engagement. One of the ways we can go forward with things like this is to involve some form of face-to-face ‘getting to know you’ and then use the digital environment as an adjunct to that, or to continue that relationship. Because I think that way, you'll establish those connections between people that can't necessarily connect in an online environment. As we all discovered during COVID, it's very difficult to establish new connections in a purely online environment. It's part of what we have available to us in terms of the tools, but we need to be careful how we use it.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Excellent. That leads us nicely on, I think, to some reflections on that topic. Does anybody want to come in on any part of student communities? We've finished on online platforms, but we've also been talking about peer communities more generally.

Wayne Clark (UAL)
Hopefully this is not too anecdotal, but what we do at UAL is work very closely with individual students, often seeing them multiple times in the work that we're doing. One of the things I've certainly noticed, I think probably this term actually, is that interest amongst some of the students on talking to, particularly first years, around informal peer relationships that they're developing themselves particularly and specifically outside of their course. And I think in some cases this has come from, it partly goes back to what Colin was saying earlier, almost the pressure of making friends in that first term of the first year and perhaps almost feeling that they failed if they don't do that in some way. And I suppose it's that ideal of friends for life that you might meet at university, kind of classic model. A few students I've been working with, they have talked about how, exactly as you say, they're trying to develop little communities of shared interest and identity outside of the course itself. I suppose it's horizontal in that sense. An example would be, I work with a student at the moment, who has decided to set up his own magazine, so he's working within the design area. He's now recruited, so to speak, other students to work with him to develop this magazine with no input from the institution at all actually. So, there may be little opportunities there to work with students in that sense. I know the library has expressed some interest in this and I'm just talking to the course team about it as well. I think there could be tensions there, but there may be some role for course teams as well to try and help students along that line. 

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
It's really interesting actually, about Unibuddy. I wondered, from that, do people then create societies? That relationship between beginning on the online and then is there support from, say, the student union to help convert that into something that could then become a face-to-face community? Societies and sports are obviously a massive thing, but actually the societies are for everything, and it seems to be a really important part of how they manage that transition because everybody is in some sort of society. I wonder if there's much of that translating into face-to-face?

Catherine McConnell (Brighton)
I think there's definitely more we could do to formalise that. There's a tension between student-generated and not imposing ourselves as a union or a university to neatly fit them into our structure and that would be nice as a case study, and letting them be and letting that evolve. But I have been thinking, as we've all been talking, about the need to map it from Unibuddy's pre-arrival and then how can we sustain or help the students sustain that? How can the union help facilitate carrying those groups on or whether they naturally disband or how do we help the students pass on the baton to the next group of students, or would a new group of students want to feel like the pioneers are setting up that group again, even if it's a new Dungeons and Dragons group, it belongs to them, and whether they were joining something? It might be great for them to join it, or it might take away their autonomy. I don't know. I'd really be interested to do some research into that.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
It's something that we encourage at De Montfort, because, going back to the staff overwhelm issue, sometimes there isn't a peer mentoring or some sort of student led or student grouping within a programme. And so, we encourage the students to come forward and try and set one up. And if they can't get anything off the ground within the programme itself, we steer them to the students’ union and the students’ union will help them set up their own group. And that's happened numerous times. It's about enabling the students to do that. There are issues, obviously, in that in terms of where does this take place? Going back to Colin's point about space and place making, where do those interactions take place? And when? The curriculum is very stacked at the minute and when do you have the time to interact? Particularly horizontally as we're talking, across programme areas where you might not have the same time to interact with each other and that's a big issue and it's a structural issue that needs to be addressed, systemically. 

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
I think that also speaks to, I can’t remember if it was Colin or Tracy who mentioned, the student type that we have today is quite different, has changed quite significantly and specifically with regard to working students for whom university life, perhaps, is just their side gig, so they schedule their work around their timetable. They'll come in for a lecture and leave. You made me think about some of the other challenges and barriers we might face in setting these things up and facilitating these peer communities in the uptake. Are they actually hanging around for this?

Jason Eyre (DMU)
That's precisely the issue. You've got the world of work, your life world, family, caring responsibilities, all sorts of things going on. Then you've got your curriculum studies. If we then just say, "create peer friends as well". When have we got time for that? When does this happen?

Tracy Slawson (DMU)
I think also what we have to be careful of in that is the negative impact that could have on a sense of belonging, because if you don't have time to be that student, then you don't feel you fit in or you belong because of your lifestyle, because of how you're seeing university.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
We piloted something at Manchester Met when we went for teaching. It was English so they didn't have lots and lots of hours. But we went 10-12 and 2-4 for all of our classes and we did fewer days but those days, and what we found was we then had this sticky lunch thing. Students who are commuting were around for lunch, for socialising. But we could also put in our peer assisted learning at 1pm until 2pm and we could work that way. It was difficult for timetabling, but actually we did see a big uptake in engagement. The things we could schedule in that time that we preserved, they weren't being taught. We couldn't work in those two hours, you couldn't get home and come back. So, people did stay for the day. It seemed to have an impact. 

Jason Eyre (DMU)
I think that's one way forward if, rather than thinking of curriculum and co-curriculum, we think of something that's in between curriculum aligned and timetabled. And even if you're creating a space. We've got a group within the university that does something called Gurus and Grasshoppers, which is studio-based culture, studio-based learning, where they schedule a timetable, the year threes and the year ones, to be in the same studio at the same time. Simple things like that mean that you've got that differential in knowledge and experience. You've got shared interest, and you can enable that interaction to occur. But that requires care and management and thought to do.

Colin Milligan (GCU)
I don't have any particular experience of this, I'm interested theoretically, I suppose. I'm attracted by the pedagogy of the vertical type approaches and the advantages for engagement of the more senior students and motivation for the younger students. Time and time again, we see evidence of the students wanting to know things, but they don't feel they can ask the staff. Is that something we can put as a selling point? Also, in terms of vertical projects, the idea of building feed forward through the curriculum where you do something in first year that you then revisit in a different role in 2nd and 3rd year. And of course, it is difficult to build it into the curriculum, but the benefits are so great in terms of actually becoming the teacher, etcetera. I think that's something that we can use to drive uptake of this.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Last contributions because we're walking towards our well-earned break.

Alasdair Blair (DMU)
Mine is a bit random, but when you were talking about timetabling and you were talking about international students, I was thinking about how our timetable and also food and campus and catering offer never really works. Our Chinese students want a hot lunch often, and then we give them a sandwich and that 2-hour break at lunch time is what they expect. We don't give them that because they're shuffling between classes. I know we're not talking about that here.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
Catherine and I had a conversation about this yesterday. The food and the availability of food at particular times of the day, everything closes here at 4pm. Where do you go for a coffee on campus? Well, you can't. And that's something we need to think about as an institution. There are financial imperatives at play here and they need to be considered.

Part 3: Student-centred and enquiry-based learning

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
We are moving onto student-centred and enquiry-based learning. Why is enquiry-based, or student-centred, learning important in supporting student retention?

Alasdair Blair (DMU)
I take it back to my own experience of being a student, international politics or history student. And you're thinking, what am I going to do? In that sort of degree programme, what am I going to learn? What am I going to produce? Here we're in a faculty of art, design and humanities. And you look across, there's workshops. I've got to come out with a hammer or shoe or something like that, this is my thing or student work on the wall here. And I think that ability to have a student who can express what not just their education has been about, but what their experience is about and also have something to showcase from it and learn through that process. Rather than just learning through a book and learning through really quite a passive learning experience. I think it's more challenging for some subjects than others. But also, back in my educational experience, I can remember probably 3 or 4 times maybe what happened in a class. So, to me, I think it's really important in thinking about teaching and learning through that challenge, enquiry lens, rather than just thinking this is a subject and we're just going to teach you the subject. But also getting people to think about, take for example, housing, which is a really important issue in the UK. If you read minutes on local housing planning committees, you can often see that they’ve spent 3 hours on debating some new house. And out of that time, they'll probably spend 2 1/2 hours thinking what's the front colour of the doors going to be. And then get people to read into the minutes and read into that type of stuff and thinking about it in a way which gets them to understand the subject matter, rather than just saying planning is important or public administration. But what does it mean to them? And then get them to say, for example, put them in an environment which might be to take into local planning committee, take them to present their work. I was just talking in the break about how, in the past, we've taken students the House of Commons to present their stuff, to understand what it means to be in that environment, to envisage it. And that I think also is because it gives students a set of skills and a repertoire, it enables them to present themselves in a more democratising way. You can have the opportunities for students to go and travel abroad or to take placements, etcetera. But often they're not for all students. Not all students can do them for a whole number of reasons, cultural, religious, travel, money, etcetera. But if you can then create an environment where students can all speak to and understand about the subject in a way that gives them an elevating or an accelerator type pitch. When they're thinking about their subject, when they're describing it and telling others in employment opportunities so that when they go for that job interview or when they leave the university, and they can present an image of what they've been doing. But then it actually I think is a lot easier to communicate what they've been doing. I remember years ago we had students who went on placement, and we asked them to take a photograph of the placement. We had people taking photographs of their desk. That wasn't exactly what we wanted, but it was getting them to shift that mindset. So, to me, enquiry, student-centred learning is important because it keeps people from a retention perspective engaged in understanding about their subject and getting them to think about their subjects in certainly an applied way and that applied way often makes it real to them. Then it communicates that in a way which also gives them opportunities, and that opportunities are both in the here and now in terms of how they like the subject, learn about the subject. It doesn't just seem distant to them in terms of a book. It brings them closer to it, but it also gives them, hopefully, skills that are here, in the here and now as well as in the future.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Thank you very much. I'll pass over to you each to contribute...

Leanne Grice (UAL)
Excellent. I’ll just mention, first of all, that we should have had Siobhan Clay here who hasn't been able to make it. So, she might put forward some contributions afterwards. I think in terms of, from an art and design university, which is where we're from, we have a lot of students who over the years have come in and felt like what they're learning doesn't really reflect who they are and they can't really connect with, perhaps, some of the artists or designers or practices that they're being taught. Enquiry-based learning is really important for our students to be able to bring themselves into the subject and be able to look at people who represent them and be able to learn in that way. And that's something that we know that students have left the university because they don't feel that connection and because they don't feel like they belong to the course because, for example, they're learning all about white male artists and that isn't a reflection of who they are. We also have a lot of students who are not from the UK, so the kind of practices that they come in and are learning from tutors might not necessarily be the way that they've learnt to do them before or the way that they like to do them. So again, being able to bring their own culture and skills into their course is really important in being able to make that connection. I think it's also something that the tutors really value as well because we find that our tutors learn a lot from the students and then that can be then passed on to other students and they can have a better understanding of cultures as well. One of the things that really comes out of this is students being able to develop their own practice and their own identity. There's a lot been said in the past about when you get A Level art and design students and sometimes, you'll see a portfolio and it's exactly the same because they've been taught in a specific way to do specific things. So being able to learn in this way helps them develop themselves in their practice and have that separate identity than from other students.

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
Totally agree with Leanne on the points of students, the importance of enquiry-based and student-centred learning on the student sense of belonging and ownership of what they're learning and how that translates to their practice. Just to bring in a bit of recent experience as well, I was running a focus group last night with a group of students, which was in the context of trying to address the uncomfortable truth of the awarding gap between home [White] students and home Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic students. Some of the things that came up in those conversations really support the importance of this enquiry-based and student-centred learning approach. Students were saying on this course that it's great to learn about British subculture and French, Victorian fashion and all the Western-centric influences on journalism and fashion, for example. But where is there any addressing of say, Indian fashion or Japanese heritage in the work? And we have such an international cohort as Leanne mentioned. So that was something that was quite uncomfortable to hear for the course team, I think. And the students did feel like they couldn't bring themselves to that particular unit because they couldn't connect to it, because the curriculum didn't reflect who they are. Quite a lot of work is being done around recentring the focus of curriculum design and including students in that.

Wayne Clark (UAL)
Thanks, Tanyeem. I think it might be worth saying that certainly there seems to be an inherent connection between art and design and creative arts and this type of work, as we were just indicating. I know certainly the research that I've looked at seems to show that students within those disciplines are more engaged and more motivated when they choose their topics in the way that we've described and developed the self-directed learning. And I think that's the heart of what happens at UAL, but it is also something of a normative ideal as well. It's not necessarily the case that every piece of work is of this type that's done from day one, but it's certainly something to aim for. I think that's a good description that you started with. It's very much that sense of working from the inside out in a pedagogical sense that comes from the student self-directing themselves in the way that Tanyeem described.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Fantastic. OK, we'll move on to the next question. I think we've started to move into this space already, so it might be that we don't need the full 10 minutes, but what are the examples of practice at your institution where you're using this approach? So, if we can have some of the best practice of what's happening.

Alasdair Blair (DMU)
So at the university, we've just put in something where we've been doing block teaching now for three years and we're then thinking about how do we communicate or think about pedagogically that block teaching approach. So, we presented that, now we call it an active teaching and learning model, where we're trying to get people within faculties across the university to describe, present, account for it. That varies in this faculty. Quite a lot of it you could imagine the making, the producing, the work, the art shows that people do. But in other faculties we see students, for example, in business and law doing stuff in terms of more challenge-based things around the local economy or engaging researchers and counting homelessness and things like that. So, I think they are examples of how I suppose might see it as being like projectized in a way. But from us, I think a student perspective or student-centred learning, we're encouraging our staff to decouple the curriculum from just being a textbook leading approach to actually thinking about how the teaching environment is centred. So that's partly from a timetable perspective that block has been important in, so that we aren't just this lecture format, but equally we haven't got a campus that is devoid of lectures. So, lectures are there from a resource point of view as well, and they serve certainly a function, but I think we're wherever possible trying to work with our students. Some of that has involved in student consultant programmes, and those type of things. So, we bring students in, but at the same time we are aware that that only reaches so many of our student body, it doesn't reach all of our students. So, there's some equitable challenges within that as well. We've been thinking about ways in which assessment works and how we give students the opportunity to present their work. An example in my own area would be instead of getting students write an essay, they might write a policy report, or they might try and think of how to present that or do a pitch for students. In the past when I was more in faculty, we had students instead of with a dissertation, we would get them to present their work and communicate it to local MPs or councillors, etcetera. So again, very personal to them, but actually quite important skills in terms of how they showcase their work and understand their work rather than it just being this dead document that gets filed away forever in the base of the library as they used to be. So, trying to bring these things to life, other stuff that we've done is get students to have posters. So how do students understand what good looks like and that type of work? So, posters of students work, and also with staff and staff work and profiles of both, I think, is important in all of that. 

Leanne Grice (UAL)
I'm just going to mention, it’s interesting that you talked about staff because I think that's one of the things that UAL is working on quite a lot at the moment, is getting that connection with staff and students. So, often staff will write things from their mindset, and it makes sense to them, but they don't necessarily understand it might not make sense to students or even some of the staff members. I've recently been part of some reapprovals for a course and they've got students in at the very beginning who can comment on either what's to come, so if it's a first year student who's looking at the second year documentation, they can say, “oh no, that doesn't make sense to me”. Or they can have a third year there who says, “oh yeah, when I did that in the second year, it was really valuable”, or “it didn't make any sense”. I think that's really good because it's supporting students in the future. It might not impact on them straight away, but they are able to look at it from the students’ perspective quite early on. Another similar thing, we've got collaborative units which again have been through a lot of changes, not reapprovals, but minor moderations. Groups of students have been part of those moderations and helped to develop the learning outcomes, and it was the collaborative unit that was quite difficult to manage. It's always been quite problematic, but being able to get the students in and just talk about what didn't work for them, but also what learning outcomes didn't really make sense or fit with what they thought they were doing. We haven't seen the impact of it yet because it's been the first year that it's changed this year and it's happening at the moment. But I think there is going to be quite a significant impact on the students experience of that. It goes back to something that I think Colin said earlier as it's not actually just about the data and the figures. It's important we're doing this to improve the experience of the students. We might not actually see that in the data, but I know from our work, and I don't know if you guys want to talk about this, we've got the forum as well.

Wayne Clark (UAL)
This is something that's linked to the sticky course project and you can see on the website some blogs that we produced, some dialogic blogs in conjunction with students. We set up a student-led forum and it was really an opportunity for students to, in a sense, become almost staff. We invited staff to come along as audience members and the students actually ran the session. There are a number of sessions we covered: fostering connections, digital engagement, cultural identity, and time management. As I say, you can read a bit more about that on the website. But it's really interesting because it was very much the students designing the sessions. It was student-centred in that sense, but to staff. It was almost like a reversal of your classic delivery method. I think it was actually really productive, not just for the students, but for the staff as well. They learnt quite a lot about student perspective, and it was about very specific things that the students chose, not things that we suggested to them.

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
I can add to some of the stuff around the student-led forums and the work that both those particular students who ran the forum and the workshops did. As Wayne mentioned, it was students leading staff in the workshops, quite a vulnerable place to put some students because there are quite senior staff there; they might have seen their lecturers there as well. The students were very open and honest and gave quite a lot of tips and perspectives on their learning and what would enhance their learning and engagement. And as Wayne said, we did gather some feedback and staff did say quite explicitly that it was something that they'd like more of, more frequently, that they'd like to see replicated across the university with different themes as well. Another example of the impact that the forum had was that then we were approached by colleagues from the academic enhancement team at London College of Fashion who wanted to run a similar forum led by student Changemakers and got some advice from us on how we set it up.  I actually attended that forum, and the staff attendance was also good. From the work that we did on the forum, the extension of that across other groups and teams at the university was also visible. People are still coming back to us asking about whether or not there might be future forums. It did highlight the importance of student-led learning.

Wayne Clark (UAL)
That's the thing. It's learning. It wasn't just a student voice opportunity because there are so many of those and quite rightly. But students get over surveyed, I think they're always telling us that. Their opinion about whatever, again and again. This was different because it was essentially almost like a big seminar. The students designed it, and it was up to them what the outcomes would be. We just sort of supervise them really. And I think it is a good example of a student-centred approach, more genuinely student-centred. It was not curriculum related in any way at all, which is another aspect.

Leanne Grice (UAL)
I think also to add to that is, I know we've talked about this, about staff and getting staff involved. We did have a good amount of staff involved, but you do see the same staff coming, and even though people walked away and said, “oh, I'm going to do this differently in my lectures now, I'm going to do this differently”, probably the people who really need to be there aren't the people who come along.  I think you have to be quite confident to go along to a session like that and be taught by a student how you should be teaching differently. I think that's something that we need to think about, is how to get it out to those people who probably really do need it.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
That's a recurring theme. Alasdair, you came up with something else you want to say?

Alasdair Blair (DMU)
I suppose the other side of the coin is how do we enable it to happen? I think three things I'd probably point out from our perspective, the university, is every academic member of staff that we hire, and this should happen in terms of practice but maybe there's been inconsistencies, had to give a teaching presentation. You'd expect that to happen, but sometimes it doesn't happen. The other is that we have in terms of retention and students and that focus on student learning, we have these seven principles and values and themes that sit across the university. One of them is certainly focused on retention. The other is the work where Nicola and colleagues at our Education Academy. We used to call it a centre and the focus on academy is very much about network exchange, and that the sense of learning from others, that everything doesn't just sit in the centre. That's not just about a staff perspective; that's also about learning from an engagement with students. I think that brings it back. Often people perceive that knowledge sits either in the centre, which is either the centre of the management administration or the academic department, and actually, seeing this very much more in an organic format that we have to learn and engage and understand with our students. Those are three things.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Excellent, thank you. We'll move on to the final question in this set, which is what's been the impact of enquiry-based or student-centred learning on things like student attainment and engagement in their studies? What are the measurable impacts that we've seen? Claire, do you want to go?

Claire Orwin (DMU)
Yeah, sure. That’s absolutely fine. I think what's interesting is, obviously we need to think about all the different types of student-centred learning and enquiry-based, that we have. I think the interesting thing about a question like this is, lots happened, it's similar to what we're talking about with peers across the university. It's about the evaluation saying, what's the impact of that? I think what's been useful is work that Alasdair and another colleague, James Russell, in the university have been doing around this active learning and teaching model, is it's about been surfacing examples of practice and it's created these provocations for conversation. There's a couple of examples that I’ve started to look at very much in line with this project. And could these be case studies about different activities staff were doing, and then looking at their attendance and attainment around that. One example is our product design programme here, their first year, first block module, which is about starting to become and think about being the designer. The idea is that through that first block, that first seven-week block, they come up with a portfolio. But I think what's interesting is they use that as a vehicle to orientate themselves around all the workshops here and all the different facilities, and to go through those stages of how you might build a portfolio. But then also they use that as a mechanism to then link that in with their personal tutoring. So then, when they appraise that portfolio, they're very much bringing that in, in terms of that student-centred conversation about where you are and how your skills are reflected and where that can build. Because students have obviously come in with lots of different backgrounds. Then they also do fun things like they make their own Lego figure, and they encourage to customise that so it can be about your identity. And that's a really nice way for people to be able to share that with their peers, staff, to learn more, etcetera and to develop those relationships. Since I've been doing this and they've evolved it year on year, as Alasdair says, this is our third year of doing block teaching. When I looked at last year to this year, their attendance rates have increased. They definitely have said that this year their personal tutoring engagements increased. Whilst we have a formalised structure, it's not necessarily on the timetable, but also, they've got a positive pass rate this year where everybody's passed. Another example, I was talking to some colleagues in our postgraduate provision and they're using Miro Interactive Whiteboard, I don't know if people are familiar with that, as a real strong learning tool within their activities in their classes. They're streaming this right across their modules where they're doing this. They're using that as a way to help to bring students together and put students in the centre of their learning. So, whilst they're doing their digital design orientated modules, the students are encouraged to use that. They use it as ice breakers all the time. It's got very high international cohort, and they've found that, on reflection from the students, the shyer students have been able to express themselves. They'll do things like your journey to university; they'll get students to illustrate. Some students are doing it pictorially, some students are doing through written, they've got that that option, but also then they're doing live formative feedback. The staff are contributing, the students are contributing. It's creating that atmosphere, which is really nice, which is the sorts of things I think we see in foundation type provision that's really positive practice. Their attendance rates have been good, very positive, higher than our expected average. And also, two out of the three modules have got 100% pass rate that I've looked at this year.  So, I think they're just some interesting examples. There are other ones that we need to be looking at. It doesn't mean to say that it isn't necessarily always a positive correlation, I'm sure it isn't. But they were just a couple of examples. I think just more in terms of this real-life learning as well. It's very much a core thing that's important. We have a big DMU community team. So, how can courses get involved in community-based work? We've got examples of practice where we're working with charitable organisations, maybe doing campaigns and obviously working with employers, employer-based projects, real life projects are very much a cornerstone, and they use a lot in Business and Law and particularly in my own faculty: Art, Design and Humanities. What we find with those is, that's what Alasdair was saying, if people get an exposure, they're building confidence, but then also often there'll be a prize that's maybe work experience, a placement. And we know then that work experience and placements have a positive correlation with attainment, but also can definitely then help with graduate outcomes. So, I think those types and styles of things that Alasdair was talking about before, it's now just threading through that evidence chain, I think. But definitely anecdotally, those things really do have positive impact.

Wayne Clark (UAL)
Not to throw a spanner in the works, but I think we also need to think about the complexities of this type of learning as well for some students. Leanne, I know you have particular experiences in Fine Art, but I'll just make a couple of comments and then if both of you want to come in. My particular thing that I've picked up at London College of Communication, where I'm mainly based within UAL, is the experience of international students. As I said earlier, a lot of the work we do is face-to-face for students and perhaps it's the more qualitative side of looking at the impact of this type of learning and assessment in particular. Some of the international students I talk to, they do find it quite challenging, that enquiry-based approach. They're not necessarily used to it in a general sense. The interest in them being self-directed is not necessarily familiar to them, particularly in relation to assessment. That, what I would call, fairly open relationship that we have between academic staff and students at the same time is also something that a lot of international students are really not familiar with when they come to the UK and to UAL. A lot of them are used to a more hierarchical top-down approach to their relationship with their course team. I think those combined; those can be quite challenging experiences for some international students. I think we need to be careful that we don't necessarily assume that all students can deal with this type of work from day one of their first term.

Leanne Grice (UAL)
In terms of home students, I've found a similar issue when it's come to students who've come from A-Level and the students who've perhaps done a foundation. Those who come from a foundation, they've got different educational experiences and are used to that kind of teaching. Those who come from A-Level are used to, similar to international students, more hierarchical, being told what they need to do. So, when they're coming in in Year 1 and some of them are A-Level students and then some of them are foundation or BTEC students who are used to that. There's quite a gap in their skills and knowledge and knowing how to do that. As Wayne said, this can be a real benefit for some students, but perhaps there needs a bit more direction and students need to learn how to do it rather than just being told to go away and just work things out themselves, which in some cases does happen.

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
I think, on that point as well, just being mindful of these challenges while we are as an institution and in this room, we acknowledge the importance of enquiry-based and student-based learning, and the benefits for that potentially for students. Thinking very carefully about the students’ academic culture and background and what they're bringing and what their perception is of their learning expectations. Are they coming to learn from the master? They don't necessarily want to challenge or critique or have much input. It's an uncomfortable space for some students to be put in as well. Also, just thinking about other home students who might not have as much privilege or as much exposure to this aspect of higher education, this type of learning. There are aspects of the hidden curriculum there. I think a lot of training and learning needs to happen around that for the students before they can fully engage with the concept of enquiry-based learning. But certainly, at the University of the Arts, there are lots of examples of colleagues around the colleges making quite a lot of effort in this area. I know from personal experience at the language centre, the approach that language learning and language teaching takes is very much student-centred, especially if you have been trained in the classic English language, learning as a second language, ELT, where it is very much about understanding the student context and the student needs before you even design your syllabus, for example. There's a lot of work around the college and I think Siobhan can speak to some of that as well in terms of the impact that is having.

Leanne Grice (UAL)
In terms of impact on attendance and engagement, we know that from our student surveys that a lot of students really do appreciate coming to UAL and getting that freedom. That's one of the things that comes up so often. Freedom, freedom of expression, being able to be free and do what I'm interested in. So, it is a really positive thing, we don't want to be negative about it. We just think there could be more guidance on it, which hopefully this tool kit might bring. But also, with the co-creation work that's happening with students as well. There has been a lot of positive feedback from students on that and also staff because I think students, as Wayne said, are often given that idea that they're coming in and being told what to do. But when they're part of that creation and helping to develop their course, they feel more connected to it. They feel like they have belonging over their course and perhaps can go away and have that more explorative side of the course as well. 

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
That's brilliant. Thank you for those contributions, everybody. Should we move on to some reflections now from the audience? Something that was particularly interesting in what we're talking about with the different types of learners and expectations, as the mother of a near teenager who realised only the other day, there's no coursework left in GCSEs or A-Levels, they just do exams. It's a really interesting and new context. So, reflections on these things, just student-centred and enquiry-based learning more broadly.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
Tanyeem, I just wanted to go back to something that you were saying about the discomfort you felt by colleagues when the nature of the curriculum is revealed as to be very Anglocentric and Eurocentric. It's quite interesting what you're talking about with the student-led forums. What I can see there is you're moving beyond this idea of engaging students, which is quite a passive thing; to be engaged, to more student involvement so that they're actually involved in it. And helping to shape and to formulate the world as it is rather than the world as it was. That has implications for pedagogy in terms of the way academic staff are prepared to engage in that environment, that it's not just simply a matter of conveying what the masters have done, but to be able to engage in different ways in a receptive way. That’s interesting to me in terms of what that means for how we teach teachers to teach. It's really interesting stuff. 

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
Thank you. That's a really useful way of looking at it as well.

Alasdair Blair (DMU)
On that point about teaching teachers to teach, we've changed the way in which we're delivering our postgraduate certificate in teaching and learning practice at the university. Previously we were an apprenticeship, then we pulled away from that and now we've changed it so we sit on four blocks of reflective block curriculum. But we're focused on things such as inclusive teaching which we hadn't been. So, we were explicit in the one hand, but not actually explicit in terms of the curriculum. We've got a particular module on inclusive teaching; we've got a module in digital teaching. Something we were less clear on before is it was an assumption that people would be able to do stuff. Whereas now we're a lot clearer in terms of the practices and the pedagogy behind it. But the other side of it is, in terms of creating a student-centred learning environment, we've got a module on coaching and teaching and learning in higher education. The idea there, of course, is that staff understand or appreciate more their own position and the position of the students and trying to create a stronger dialogue and understanding the learning environment and how conversations are less about just transaction and more about actually an engaged discussion. And so, trying to have those foundational blocks at the beginning is important.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
It's called the PGCert in Empowering Education, so it's not just about the nuts and bolts to teaching.

Leanne Grice (UAL)
We have something similar. We've got the PGCert in Academic Practice and inclusive teaching was an option, as an elective. But in the last two years, they've made it compulsory for everybody who does it because we had a similar thing, everybody who needed to do it wasn't choosing it as an option.

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
To pick up on the point around students who are more and more declaring - or being diagnosed with - neurodiversity, learning differences, disabilities, long term health conditions that are all impacting on their engagement, and bringing it back to inclusive practice and training: the disability team at UAL run quite a lot of sessions, which are currently running at the moment with the hope that staff can start attending because it's come to the end of term and maybe their timetables have freed up a bit. I went to a couple recently around inclusive feedback during presentations and crits. All the sessions I went to really touched on some very important and useful pedagogy that staff could be applying on a day-to-day basis, to have universal inclusivity, inclusive by design for everybody rather than for it to be focused on students with individual study agreements because of their diagnoses. That just brings up the point of the need for ‘teaching teachers to be teachers’ in a changing climate. Our understanding of what students are and what they need is constantly changing. We need to change our pedagogy accordingly and adapt.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
Because those academic staff would have been taught in a different way. So that's what they know in terms of teaching and we don't want them to necessarily be reproducing that approach. It's interesting.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
It’s a really interesting argument about what staff are comfortable with because of how they were taught. I had a module, we designed a first-year module for Level 4, and it was the first block in block teaching. But we had them do a project linked to Manchester because at Manchester Met, they could do it on anything they wanted to. It really built into this idea of connecting with their identity, like the Lego people, because they could do it on anything. So, we had people do it about Manchester music scene. We had people do it on football. People did it on their own family history. Somebody had an uncle, he was really into that type of music, and they did it about them. We also let them present it any way they wanted to. So, they could make a themed cake, or they did podcasts, they did videos. We saw a massive reduction in the number of students who failed that first module, everybody passed it. Everybody got really engaged and they got higher marks on that module than any of the subsequent modules where they were writing essays, or they were doing quite straightforward things. But staff were really resistant to the idea, it wouldn't be something they taught.

Wayne Clark (UAL)
I think linked to that is that idea of, what is actually produced? I guess the more traditional essay model still exists at UAL without a doubt. But for example, the key part of what students do is their exhibitions. So just walking through the college yesterday, the postgraduate exhibitions are on. So everything is visual and presented in a public space, and members of the public can come in as well. Families of students come in and wander around and look at the stuff. It's very visual. It's visible and it's exhibited. So again, that is a form of student-centred presentation, I think.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
Should we move on to the next section?

Claire Orwin (DMU)
I'm just going to say something in terms of a brief reflection, in terms of what you were saying about that scaffolding for students to be comfortable with different types of and styles of learning that they've not experienced before. And then just reflecting on what you were saying then, Wayne, about the exhibition-type element. I think there's also something really interesting about students’ confidence to sometimes put themselves out there in a public facing. I think it's interesting that on reflection of some of our programmes that whereas students might do crits or do a visual display of their work as part of assessment, sometimes students don't engage, not because of not necessarily doing the work, but because they're uncomfortable about sometimes putting it there as well. I think that's also an interesting thing around taking something, for example, if we're all making a box to hold those pens in, that might feel a lot safer than if we were all to create our own individualised personal reflection of what that might look like if we were relating it to identity. I think it's just some really interesting food for thought in terms of the projects.

Part 4: Sticky courses

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
We're going to move on to the last part, and the more rigidly chaired sections and then we'll have lunch. We've got to think about defining a sticky course as that which helps the students stick to and with their learning. It’s a summary, capturing lots of the things we've been talking about. How have our conversations helped to articulate what's effective in helping students stick to, and stick with, their course? What are the key themes of what we've discussed this morning? We've got 15 minutes between us to try and capture some of the most important parts of what we've been talking about.

Wayne Clark (UAL)
I don't know whether this is really of any practical use, hopefully it's not too conceptual. But one of the things that struck me, and it goes back to what Susan said at the start, it's been a theme through some of the things we're talking about. I think one of the things we're doing with the sticky course work, and it might not be a major thing, but is we are problematising the idea of dropping out. Susan mentioned dropping out, and it's a term that you hear a lot. It's often just banded around in relation to metrics around retention, continuation, so on. But I think thinking of the work that we do, particularly with one-to-one with students, as I was saying, I think Claire, you touched on this, it mentioned a typology, so to speak, of withdrawal, students being withdrawn, the other things. Colin, you've mentioned students who don't get started. I would also add, we offer students time out and that's something we work with students on, to actually talk about what that is and whether it's a good option for them at a particular time. So, there are all these different ways in which students come into that arena of dropping out, broadly put. Students transfer courses as well. I'm working with a student at the moment who might want to transfer courses. I think that one of the things that struck me is that we need to maybe tease that out a bit and how it relates to the idea of the sticky course. It does take time, I think, to work with a student to tease out what their particular needs are at that time. It does also give us a bit more of the students’ stories. Again, I think Susan mentioned at the start that if you sit behind the stats, it's really difficult to get to those stories if you don't spend time with students. Obviously, there's a capacity issue there, but you need a closeness with students. That, again, unpicks this idea of dropping out or being disengaged in some way before you might drop out, I think particularly around first years. The only other thing I'd add in relation to that, and again, I hope it's not too broad, but I think sometimes there's an assumption that students are fully autonomous and self-reflective and all the things we've been talking about and perhaps show that in the early stages they might not be, they don't really know why they're there or what they're doing or as you were saying, why they're doing it necessarily. So again, thinking about some of these concepts around stickiness and dropping out and so on, I think we need to bear that in mind as well about where students are at on that journey.

Claire Orwin (DMU)
I just wanted to make a brief comment because it's really interesting, that concept of using the word ‘dropping out’ is quite controversial and to use ‘drop out’ is such a negative terminology. We've had a lot of conversations about this and some of this relates to our foundation or other programmes, under an Ofsted remit as well about that positive partial completion. There's something about a sticky course might not mean that a student actually graduates and completes their whole journey, but actually a sticky course could still be positive if it does provide what the student wants at that moment in time. Because there are always going to be factors beyond anyone's control, the student, the institution, etcetera, that might impact their learning. But if it's created a positive experience and given value, then in a way I guess that still sticks with that sticky course concept. 

Alasdair Blair (DMU)
I was going to reflect on that I was looking through my notes and thinking of the conversations that to me seem they're all relevant, but how do students stay, and how do we keep it sticky? You're talking about peer communities; we’ve talked about transition and talked about language and international students and the sense of identity. To me, one of the important challenges is that when we're teaching and engaging with students, we try and make it as relevant to them as possible, but accessible as possible. You give the example of the ‘messages’, it doesn't translate very well in England. But also, how does that then create an identity for students at that institution? How do they feel attached to that institution? I think at times we don't create that well enough for them, so they see the courses being not necessarily fully integrated. It's a series of modular building blocks and one module doesn't talk to another module. That sense of identity sometimes gets lost for the student because they are, in effect, passing through stages as if it's like locks in the canal and each one is just a stage rather than actually a total journey.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
Can I just come in on that? Because that's a theme that ran through it for me as well, this idea of identity. Because when we're talking about staff and student or lecturer, tutor and student, that's very much an institutional identity, and it's binary, it's based on employment and enrolment status. So, there's quite rigid boundaries there. But when we're talking about identifying with a professional or a discipline or whatever the course of study is, that's a little bit more fluid and blurred, particularly if you've got mature students coming in or postgraduates who are practitioners or, in the case of arts, people who are already artists, even if they're 19, and feel a sense of identity with what they're studying rather than the institution in which they're in. Just thinking about the peer work that we're doing, that vertical access where we're talking about different year levels. Certainly, third year undergraduates feel a sense of belonging not just to the institution, but to the professional or the discipline that they're in, that their exemplars have become exemplars of it. It's built into our transition understanding as well, this idea of becoming. So when we're looking at transition, when we're looking at ideas of identity formation and belonging, we do need to look at it in the round as a whole, rather than just how we get people to stay into first year because that onward trajectory is meaningful to first years, because if they talk to a third year and they see what they have become, then they think, “well, I could do that”. That's powerful.

Leanne Grice (UAL)
What we sometimes have, I've experienced the students looking at third years and thinking, “I'm never going to be able to do that, I'm feeling quite intimidated by that”. But I think if they understand the journey that that third year has made to get there in the first place then that would be really helpful.

Wayne Clark (UAL)
I had a student I was talking to yesterday actually, who articulated exactly what you've just said. But he said it's very simple. They just sum it up in one word. He said it's hope. That’s the way he put it. He said, “I could see what I'm going to become, and I have hope I can become that now”. It sounded quite almost poetic the way he said it. It does sum up what you're saying about becoming.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
We talk about aspiration, but that's almost like you want to have the hope first.

Alasdair Blair (DMU)
A point I was going to make there was a real-life example is doing a Masters dissertation. Not at this university, at a different university. But the examples that they give of the dissertations are they pick the best example. I think we do that all the time as saying, “this is the example”. But the best example or best students are not the majority of our students. The majority of our students are not 95% or the first-class students. And I think sometimes in our examples, the exemplars that we give our students actually suggest that this is unattainable, that this is unrealistic, that this is something that involves out of world experience. How is this possible? Whereas I think that we have to give the average, because many of us say “that's just good enough”. Not to say that we shouldn't be stretching our students, but at the same time, it can create boundaries that problematise what should be achievable becomes unachievable in people’s minds.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
We used to get students in who were now working at the BBC and show them to load of second-year students. But actually, that's not typical. Then we said, we should find somebody who's a year or two out, who's got a job but isn't necessarily doing what they want to do yet but has found something they're enjoying for a while. Because it's not all about, you finish and you'll suddenly get transported into this amazing job, that's such a small percent. You've got to have realistic ambitions for students to help them see the steps. You can have someone five years from now perhaps who's now a more senior level, but those newly graduated students, it's a real thing as well.

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
I think that could almost be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for a student - in terms of the momentum that you were talking about - that you keep building from term one or from the first couple of weeks and maintaining that momentum. What's our responsibility there in terms of what we are showing our students as possible? Or is that their ultimate aim? And is that what they want? Is that going to make them feel like they can't achieve it so they're going to give up there and then?

Alex Cazaly (UoB)
I think that's so important in terms of grounding students and making sure that they do have realistic expectations of themselves, because we're talking about identity building and community building. But these are all time commitments for the students themselves, and we can't realistically expect them to put their time into that if there's already a lot of pressure on them to put time solely into their academics. And some students, of course, will come into a course and think, “I want a first, I'm going to get a first. That is my first focus”. But that's not necessarily how all students will get the best experience of their course. It's like we were saying earlier, they come in and it's about what does that experience mean to them? What do they want to get out of it? And that's a very individual thing. I absolutely agree that we need to not only have realistic expectations for our students, but encourage them to set realistic expectations for themselves to take away that pressure to then allow a more holistic and fulfilling university experience, rather than one solely focused on “I need to plough away at my assignment to get the best number at the end of the day”.

Colin Milligan (GCU)
It's actually got to be more than that. I think education is done to our students unless they own it. Alasdair talked about effectively making student-centred learning as the outcome because we know that's where we want them to end up. But actually, how far into the start of their course can we take them? And it is about saying, it's not about what grade of degree you get, it's actually what you get out of this that will help you for the rest of your life, whether that's in employment or anything else. As soon as you can get the student motivated to engage on their terms rather than on your terms, then that's where you start to unlock the things. I take on board the concerns that the three of you had about people coming from different academic traditions where they have got that hierarchical view. The examples that Claire said around really low stakes links and factors. Nicola talking about the low stakes activities at Manchester is a really good example of that. It says just make it yourself, own the education as soon as you can.

Tracy Slawson (DMU)
Yeah, I think that's really important, being able to show students the different pictures of what success looks like because what we have to remember as well, for a lot of students, a single version of what that looks like starts quite early. I've got a 13-year-old daughter and what success at university looks like is already starting to be shown to her and everything online in school. Students who are investing in degrees with an idea of what that looks like and what the exchange is that comes with that. So, I think that's a really valid part of what we could probably do more of, show that diversity of what success does and can look like.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
We can move on to how we're looking at the sector and our own practice. What opportunities or challenges might there be to develop our sticky course concept further? The big picture thinking, how can we develop this further?

Colin Milligan (GCU)
I think it's not rocket science, but in a way, I've thought about this project very much through the lens of the student. And yet today we've talked a lot about staff and about engaging staff. And I think that's something that we could explore through the design of the toolkit and in thinking about different levels of staff, so rather than the front-line teachers. Also, the strategy I think might be really interesting to explore to have some component of our work that looks at that. 

Catherine McConnell (UoB)
I think what comes up a lot is about where we get challenged about what activities and interventions we're trying to promote, and we believe in them. But a lot of pushback comes when it's got to be an evidence-based practice. And so, for this project, I think we should not avoid that, but work it through in some way that what constitutes evidence of a sticky course or campus or university? And what forms of evidence? Is it highly qualitative student stories? Is it impact data? And what we need to prove retention, so that it speaks to maybe a questioning audience of academics that might say, “what if I implement that? What impact will it have?”

Claire Orwin (DMU)
I think that's really interesting because it's the hooks. We talk about hooks for students, but it's hooks for staff. I was in a meeting recently, as every year you try and evolve, and we've been doing more work around instead of for international students that come straight in and don't do pre-sessional, we've traditionally always had a side line of activities. The English for Academic Success that people talked about, and we started doing some work with particular programmes, bringing that into the curriculum and embedding that in, very specifically timetabled. Early evidence is suggesting that some of these are having some really positive results. What's interesting is it’s the staff engagement. So, in a way staff have reflected that they are finding having quite a diverse cohort in the classroom, that creates challenges in terms of how to manage your students and how to be able to organise assessment and transition those students. But by having someone else come in and support in a contextualised way, they're very positive about it and then they're seeing the positivity of that. If we were almost thinking about this from what are the challenges our staff are facing around retention and therefore how does it fit and provide a jigsaw of solutions might be a way that people engage more, because I think it's a reflective thing that we've all said about staff engagement.

Leanne Grice (UAL)
I think somebody mentioned earlier about things being co-created with staff as well. So, is there space for us to work with staff within our universities about what they need and what they would choose for this sticky course toolkit?

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
The principle is the same, if we co-create with students, we might expect higher student engagement. They feel like they've had a part. If we co-create with staff, hopefully we'll have higher staff engagement.

Catherine McConnell (UoB)
I think as well that we could use the project, being sponsored by the QAA and the partnership collaboration, as a bit of kudos for their co-creation input as well. Share the benefit.

Jason Eyre (DMU)
Another potential way of getting that engagement is an adaptive reuse model. Because there's always a danger when you've got another initiative, you've just got another new thing put on the table. Going back to that conversation at the start of that transition, diversity of student experiences coming into the institution, lots of different needs. So, we then have different initiatives at each individual need. That creates a sense of overwhelm and how do you negotiate and navigate through that? Now, if we're creating the toolkit for staff, then we don't want to just be adding another thing to their plate. We want to be looking at ways where existing institutional initiatives can be integrated in some way to tell a story or to create a narrative that's coherent in some way. So, they'd look different in different institutions because we've all got different materials to work with. But just simply adding another thing to deal with, you're going to get people throwing their hands up and saying, “what do you want from me?”

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
I think UCL have done a 50 things you can do toolkit with AI in teaching and that's one of the most successful toolkits I've used in ages because there's 50 examples of different things and they've coded them all by how scale-up-able they are, how sustainable, various different categories. But you can flick through the 50 and I was working with a lot of staff in social sciences, humanities at Loughborough and they had very different disciplines. They're very different ways of teaching, different levels of engagement with AI, but everybody could find two or three things from the 50 that would have worked for them. You could adapt them, but they were actually very open to the adaptation. I thought was a really good tool because it doesn't give that burden of, this is the thing I've got to read through and understand to be able to apply it. Just pick out something that somebody's done that worked and give it a go. I think it's a very different feel to a toolkit.

Colin Milligan (GCU)
The activities that we designed as part of our transition were based on that type of idea as well. Initially we had what were called engage cards, which were 24 different lessons or adaptable lessons. It's very much, as I said, 2 PowerPoint slides, one that described the activity and one that described how you could do that. It was really front and centre. The message was you don't have to do it the way we tell you to do it. There's lots of other things. Then it also went into, this is why it's useful. But, maybe I'm cynical, but what my worry is that it's not the staff who are looking for ideas, it’s staff who don't think they need ideas that we need to reach.

Nicola Bishop (DMU)
The fact that retention and a climate where university courses are changing, a stick to it all is that if you don't retain your students, you might not have a programme. That's becoming quite a pressing thing, which perhaps in other things has been less explicit. So, I think maybe it's partly about not as a kind of threat, this is a positive thing that people can take to try and improve. The outcomes of students who are on their programmes in a context where that's going to be so important to every single programme in the country.

Wayne Clark (UAL)
That's the sort of hearts and minds element of it. Sometimes there's resistance to those things. I think sometimes people will quite legitimately think that things are ideologically driven or part of a wider focus on stats and metrics and so on. The pressures that people feel. I think if you ask an academic, what's a sticky course? They might know that concept. Why is it important, retention? They might think “oh yeah, that's around how many students go from year one to two”. So, it's dealing with those kinds of issues I think is a challenge.

Tanyeem Hussain (UAL)
I think with the staff engagement and uptake, being mindful of hourly paid lecturers who may or may not have the time or be paid to be accessing these kinds of resources is a consideration.